


like a dream in the night (who can say where we're going)

by diogxnes



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Steve and Robin are the most tender and I love them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-25 01:47:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22007935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diogxnes/pseuds/diogxnes
Summary: The window is jerked open so suddenly that Robin stumbles backward, barely managing to catch herself before she topples off the roof entirely. Where she expected to see Steve’s head sticking out there’s a baseball bat instead, studded with nails that glitter ominously in the streetlight. But before she has time to react, the bat’s being lowered, and then Steve’s face appears behind it.“JesusChrist,” he hisses at her. “What the fuck?”Her heart is pounding, Steve’s violent reaction having startled her fight-or-flight response into overdrive. She takes a few deep breaths to steady herself. "Hi," she says, hating how shaky her voice sounds.
Relationships: Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington
Comments: 15
Kudos: 206





	like a dream in the night (who can say where we're going)

Robin’s always liked her bedroom. It’s not large—nothing in Hawkins is, really—but it’s comfortable, and it’s _hers,_ as much as anything in her parents’ house can be. The walls have stayed the same soft pink that her mom painted them when Robin was little, but they’re almost entirely covered now with posters and photos and drawings, so she doesn’t mind the color too much. And there’s a big window with a good view of the yard, of the maple tree that she used to scrape her knees climbing and still does sometimes. She likes that window. She likes her room.

But right now, she thinks she might scream if she has to spend one more second trapped in here.

It’s late—2:33 a.m., her alarm clock supplies helpfully. It shouldn’t really matter, it’s not like she has anywhere to be in the morning, but she’s so frustrated at being awake that there’s a lump building in her throat and she can feel angry tears starting to prick at the corners of her eyes. She just wants to fucking _sleep_. And then she wants to _stay_ asleep for more than two hours at a time without seeing Steve bloody and unconscious, hearing vicious, Russian-accented jeering, feeling her stomach plunge as she hurtles down, down, down and then jolts awake in a cold sweat, panic clawing at her chest.

The first night after, there had been no dreams. She’d fallen asleep instantly and stayed that way for nearly thirteen hours, unmoving. But every night since has been like this—lying awake, staring up at the ceiling, both longing for sleep and dreading it. It’s been nearly a week, and in that time, she doesn’t think she’s managed more than four hours in any one night.

A sudden light blares through her window and she sits up so quickly that it makes black spots appear in her vision. Then she presses the heels of her palms into her eyes and hunches over, fighting back a sob. It’s just a car. It’s just a fucking car, probably full of people she goes to school with on their way home from a Saturday-night party, and here she is sitting up in bed and trying not to cry because she’s so afraid of the headlights.

She’s never been afraid of the dark, not even years ago as a little kid; she never felt the need to crawl into bed with her parents, to be rocked to sleep with gentle hushing noises. And she can’t start doing that now. Quite aside from the fact that she’s much too old for her parents to baby her like that, and that she isn’t enough close enough to them to ever feel comfortable asking, they’d be wrong about their reason for comforting her. They’d think it was the fire that traumatized her so badly. It wasn’t the fire. The fire wasn’t even fucking _real,_ just a stupid, ordinary cover story for something the government has forbidden her from talking about.

But she can’t take it anymore, the lying awake in her room while the whole town sleeps, the crushing loneliness that comes with her fear. So instead of lying back down like she usually does, she swings her feet over the side of her bed and fumbles in the dark for the shorts that she knows are crumpled somewhere on the floor. Her parents would be furious, she knows, but the world where she cares about things like that feels very far away from the one in which she currently lives. She scribbles a note for them just in case they wake up in time to find her gone, and eases open her bedroom window as quietly as she can. It’s an easy leap down to the soft, damp grass below.

The air is oppressively hot and sticky even in the middle of the night, and she feels a little like she’s swimming through it as she crosses the yard to her bike. Still, she feels clammy and cold all over, almost feverish, and she mounts the bike clumsily. She’s reached the end of the street before her body warms up into some approximation of normal.

She doesn’t live close to Steve, not really, but nothing in Hawkins is all that far from anything else and it takes her less than twenty minutes to get there. For some reason, biking through the dark doesn’t scare her the way lying still in her bedroom does. She doesn’t want to think about how badly fucked up she must be for that to be the case, but she’s glad, at least, that she hasn’t turned into some kind of hermit, hasn’t lost the ability to face the world beyond her own doorstep.

It doesn’t occur to her until she’s reached his house that she doesn’t have any idea which window is his. She’s never been in his bedroom before; until a week ago she’d never been in his house at all. Though she wouldn’t hesitate now to call him her best friend, and though she feels as if she can hardly remember her life before almost dying in a secret Russian base with him, her hanging out with Steve Harrington is really still quite a recent development.

Silently, she climbs off her bike, leaves it propped against a tree, and starts to circle the house, hoping to God that there aren’t any neighbors peering out of their windows at this hour. She isn’t sure what she’s looking for, exactly—a sign outside the right window that says _Steve’s Room_? But when she reaches the back of the house, her heart flutters with relief—there’s a light on in one of the windows, and thought the curtains are drawn, she’s certain that this must be it. The Harrington parents hardly seem the types to be up and about at three in the morning.

The window is just above a low, sloping part of the roof and Robin scales it easily, pulling herself up so that she stands right outside. She crouches a bit to tap on the glass, tensing, ready to jump back down and run if someone other than Steve opens the window. “Steve,” she calls quietly, and then winces at how loud she sounds against the empty night. She taps again. “Steve.”

The window is jerked open so suddenly that she stumbles backward, barely managing to catch herself before she topples off the roof entirely. Where she expected to see Steve’s head sticking out there’s a baseball bat instead, studded with nails that glitter ominously in the streetlight. But before she has time to react, the bat’s being lowered, and then Steve’s face appears behind it.

“Jesus _Christ,_ ” he hisses at her. “What the fuck?”

Her heart is pounding, Steve’s violent reaction having startled her fight-or-flight response into overdrive. She takes a few deep breaths to steady herself. "Hi," she says, hating how shaky her voice sounds.

“What are you doing here? Did something happen?” He’s still gripping the bat tightly, she realizes, even though he’s lowered it away from her face. “Where are the kids? Are you—”

“Steve. They’re fine. Nothing’s happened. I just…”

She hadn’t thought twice about coming here—hadn’t _let_ herself think twice, just biked here as quickly as she could because she didn’t know who else to turn to or where else to go. But now she feels silly and small as she looks into his face, watching his panic recede and be replaced by confusion. Now that she’s biked across town and climbed Steve’s roof and nearly fallen off when he shoved his bat in her face, the suffocating fear in her bedroom seems inconsequential, somehow. Not any less real, but less worth bothering Steve with. She shivers.

Steve steps back from the window. “Just come in before you fall,” he says, and holds out a hand to help her clamber inside.

Once she’s standing in his room, he steps away from her, looking her up and down as if for clues. She’s self conscious, suddenly, and she crosses her arms over her chest in what she hopes is a casual way—she hadn’t even thought to put on a _bra,_ for Christ’s sake. She’s a mess. She’s a fucking mess, and she knows Steve can tell, and it was a terrible idea, coming here. She doesn’t even know what she wants Steve to do—hug her? Tell her that everything’s okay? Do all of the things that she’s supposed to be able to ask her parents for? And what on earth made her think that _Steve Harrington_ would do those things, Steve, the former King of Hawkins High—never mind how gentle he is with Dustin and the others, that’s different, they’re _kids,_ and Robin’s not a kid, she’s as old as Steve, practically, and here she is standing pathetically in his bedroom because, what, she was scared of nightmares? She was afraid of the dark?

 _I’ll just go,_ she starts to say, but she’s barely opened her mouth before Steve says softly, “Couldn’t sleep?”

She shuts her mouth, surprised. His expression is unreadable. Eventually, she shakes her head.

He lets out a long, low sigh. “Yeah,” he says. “Me neither.”

Steve isn’t dressed, she realizes. He’s only wearing boxers and a t-shirt and his hair is limp in some places while other parts stick up wildly. “You look like you were sleeping.”

He makes a scoffing noise, half a laugh that also sounds a little sad. “So do you,” he points out, eyes flicking up to Robin’s own unbrushed hair. Then, with concern edging into his voice again, “Are you sure nothing happened?”

“I already told you, everything’s fine.” She says it more snappily than she means to. All her desire to be coddled has left her, suddenly. It vanished the moment she climbed through the window, replaced by this awful, defensive sort of shame.

“Robin, come on. I might be an idiot, but I’m not that stupid.” He takes a step closer to her. “You’re shaking.”

Is she? She only notices once he’s said it that she’s cold—freezing, really, despite the warm air pouring in through the open window. She crosses her arms tighter and shakes her head, unsure exactly what it is that she’s denying.

“Robin,” he repeats more softly, and reaches out to put a hand on her upper arm. “I get it, you know. I’m one of, like, ten people in the whole world that gets it. You can talk to me.”

And Robin isn’t sure whether it’s his words or the gentle way he says them or the warmth of his hand on her arm, but she feels all the fight go out of her. It’s almost like a physical thing that’s draining away, like pus. There’s a lump in her throat and the pressure is building behind her eyes and before she can stop herself, she closes the gap between them and presses her face into his shoulder, wraps her arms around him. _Real,_ she tells herself, _real, real, real,_ and she breathes his scent in deeply.

“Whoa, Buckley,” he says. “Didn’t have you down as much of a hugger.” But even as he says it he’s wrapping an arm around her shoulders, tugging her closer. “Hey, you’re okay. You’re safe, right? We’re safe.”

Robin doesn’t fall to pieces, doesn’t burst into tears or anything so dramatic. She just leans into Steve for a few moments longer before pulling away. “Sorry,” she mutters shakily, pressing her hands to her eyes to stop the tears from falling. “I’m sorry, this is ridiculous, I—”

“Hey, stop that.” And then his hand is on her arm again, pulling her over to sit down on the edge of his bed. She doesn’t fight it, and he takes a seat next to her. He still hasn’t let go, his hand wrapped loosely around her bicep. “Robs, talk to me.”

She smiles briefly at the nickname, though without any real happiness. She wonders if Steve knows that he’s the only one who calls her that. “I just can’t fucking sleep,” she says, and then realizes it’s the only thing Steve already knows. Her stomach clenches with some embarrassed sort of shame, as if her repeating herself is the thing that’s finally going to ruin her reputation in Steve’s eyes when she’s already sitting on his bed in the middle of the night trying not to cry.

“Nightmares?”

She sighs and sags a little bit. “Yeah,” she says. “Well—not tonight. Because I haven’t even fallen asleep yet. But every time I _do…_ ”

“You can’t stop seeing it.”

She shakes her head mutely. “This is so fucking stupid.”

“It is stupid,” says Steve. She looks up at him then, confused and, if she’s honest, a little hurt by his bluntness. But then he continues, and she realizes she’s misunderstood. “We’re just stupid fucking teenagers and it’s bullshit that we have to put up with this.”

Robin laughs a little, a shaky, tearful sound that she hates. “Yeah.”

His hand leaves her arm and, for a moment, it hovers uncertainly over her back, as if Steve isn’t sure what the boundaries are between them. Robin isn’t sure, either, but she finds herself wishing that he would touch her again. She craves it—the warmth, the closeness. It’s mortifying to admit, even to herself, but she wants him to pull her close and hold her again like he had just a couple of minutes ago. This time, she wouldn’t pull away.

He doesn’t touch her again, though. Instead he stands suddenly and holds out a hand to her, which, after a moment’s hesitation, she takes. She lets him pull her up.

“Come on,” he says.

“Where are we going?”

“To watch a shitty movie and take our minds off all this crap.”

“But your parents—”

“They aren’t home,” says Steve. “They’re never home.”

So she follows him out of his room, down the stairs, into a living room that looks more formal than any living room she’s ever been in. The couch is soft, though, and she lets herself sink into the cushions while Steve squats in front of the TV, rummaging through a cabinet full of VHS tapes. He pulls one out and puts it in the player.

“What are we watching?” she asks when he settles beside her on the couch.

He pulls a blanket off the back and throws it over both of them. “It’s a surprise.”

When the movie starts, she laughs—a real laugh this time. “ _Aristocats?_ Seriously?”

“Shut the fuck up, it’s a classic.”

“If you say so, dingus.”

“I do.”

“Well, then,” says Robin. The anxiety hasn’t quite left her, yet. It’s still there, the tightness in her chest and the lingering feeling that something terrifying is standing just behind her. But somehow, curled up under a blanket with Steve Harrington in a house she’s never been in before, she feels safer than she has in all the days since the mall. “Let’s watch some fucking Aristocats.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! you can find me on tumblr @ diogxnes
> 
> title from the song "more than this" by roxy music


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